The Brooknerian

The best sure cure for homesickness, which can strike at any point on a foreign holiday, is a detective story. I shall unashamedly take Patricia Highsmith, whom I am re-reading, and who does not seem to date in the very least, and hope that Ripley - her amoral character - will give me the independence to sail through any uncomfortable encounter. I shall also take Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton , which is a kind of detective story, and read breathlessly until the new owner of the property is revealed. 'Holiday Reading', Observer , 4 July 1993 I've mentioned The Spoils of Poynton before. I vaguely remember Brookner saying she reread it regularly, even annually, marvelling at its technical qualities. But I've never found the reference. Perhaps this is what I remember, though I didn't take the Observer in those days. The Spoils of Poynton is one of James's transitional works, the first or one of the first of the later 1890s novels he wrote after ...

Some obvious and not so obvious ideas for a winter break... St-Sulpice, Paris Paris is classic Brookner territory, but where to go? The rue Laugier? The old Bibliothèque Nationale, where a young Brookner was once the recipient of a magnificent bunch of flowers? The Luxembourg Gardens, to sit on an iron chair? The Crillon, where, according to Julian Barnes, Brookner was given a maid's room? No, head for the Latin Quarter and the church of St-Sulpice. Once inside, look carefully around the gloomy interior for Delacroix's Jacob and the Angel . It will help if you have a copy handy of Brookner's masterpiece, The Next Big Thing . Hyde Park, London Perhaps you want to re-enact Frances Hinton's nightmarish trek across the park and down the Edgware Road towards Maida Vale in Look at Me ? Or, for brighter moments, you might wish to drive through the park, like Mrs May on that heady summer evening in Visitors ? Hyde Park has it all. Poor Claire Pitt in Undue Influence even...

John Bayley, old-style gentleman of letters, consort to Iris Murdoch, controversial chronicler of her decline, cuts a not wholly satisfactory figure in the Brookner literature. He's a fan, but he's more of a fan of the likes of Barbara Pym and Jane Austen, and this pushes his Brookner criticism a little off centre. Here he is in the Guardian in December 2003, yet again getting it just that little bit wrong: Anita Brookner is on top form with The Rules of Engagement , which carries a plot line as strong as any of Jane Austen's (after reading a Brookner I always want to re-read a Barbara Pym and I chose her last and in some ways best, A Few Green Leaves )...  

In Brookner's  Hotel du Lac Edith Hope picks up a volume of short stories, the 'beautifully named' Ces plaisirs, qu’on nomme, à la légère, physiques . Colette, she reflects, will see her through: 'that sly old fox'. Asked by John Haffenden whether Colette's book had significance for her, Brookner replied, 'Only the title.' It was Colette's extreme adamantine viability that attracted her. She admired the author as all the characters in her own fiction flock to those on whom the gods smile and who have the gift of living successfully. Colette's 'virility', her 'innocent' sensuality, are themes in Brookner's piece in the  Observer  in March 1991 on Herbert Lottman's biography of the writer. But as ever with Brookner's reviews of such works, some hesitation is evident as to the validity or even the decency of the art of biography: Her life is contained in all her works, where it is described with exquisite discretio...

There are in this world of ours many separate fandoms, and sometimes they overlap. Often they overlap fairly predictably. So an Anita Brookner fan is probably also going to be at least some sort of a devotee of Henry James (that's me) or Edith Wharton (not me). Other authors who crop up in this regard include Barbara Pym (a not too enormous yes) and Jane Austen (ditto), writers whose world views perhaps aren't quite so aligned with Brookner's. But the coincidences I look for are the stranger ones. Who would have thought the fandoms of Anita Brookner and, for example, Doctor Who might converge? But I find more than a few folk. Myself included. There - I trust I've succeeded in surprising you. I have other enthusiasms. But I have yet to find Brookner fans who are also, say, Kingsley Amis fans or fans of certain 1980s sitcoms. But I live in hope.

One can easily imagine Anita Brookner meeting someone like Edith Templeton in somewhere like Bordighera. But Brookner and Catherine Cookson? They never actually met, but they might have. But we know Brookner read her - once. That alone inspires astonishment (and gives her an advantage over me). I read one of her novels, which ran to over 500 pages, and did not entirely manage to crack the code of its popularity, but then the novel was not intended for soft southerners. I found it artless, seamlessly written, and plotted only in the sense that everything came out right in the end, yet I could see that it possessed a certain transparency which would inspire trust and loyalty in her readers. Observer , 27 November 1988 Cookson's stories, Brookner goes on to say, are 'for the public library, destined to be read at home on a quiet afternoon', and indeed it was during my own library years that I came across Cookson. For those who do not now recognise the name, Catherine Co...

If Anita Brookner's Collected Journalism were ever published it would run to several volumes. One discovers things all the time. I've been looking through the Guardian / Observer archives, and today I come across some fresh Stendhal material. Was there ever a more Brooknerian figure? Writers, in writing of other writers, not invariably write about themselves, and this is surely the case with Brookner and Stendhal. Her review in June 1994 of Jonathan Keates biography is a straightforward retread of familiar ground, including an outing for that favourite line of Brookner's, about the after-dinner cigar. (See  here .) But a piece from January 1991, about a translation of Lucien Leuwen , delivers the most authentic hits. We find here the Brooknerian ideal just as much as the Stendhalian. And note how Brookner undermines everything with her little line within brackets. The idea that fulfilment can be achieved by courage, chivalry, a resolute indifference to past events,...

I never felt very easy about Jane Austen: I think she made a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. She forfeited passion for wit, and I think that led her to collude with certain little strategems which are horrifying in real life. She wrote about getting husbands. Anita Brookner speaking to John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , Methuen 1985 Observer : What did you read as a child? Brookner: Ah! Dickens. My father fed me Dickens. Two novels for my birthday, two novels for Christmas until I'd read the lot. And after that I think it was H.G. Wells, for some reason. I've been talked about in the same context as Jane Austen. I didn't stick that label on myself, other people did. Quite inaccurate. I've never got on very well with Jane Austen. 2001 Observer interview 'Just don't mention Jane Austen' I decided to reread Pride and Prejudice - tried to read it with an innocent eye, as if for the first time, as if I didn...

When Eileen Simpson, who has written a remarkable and moving book, went back to visit the convent, which she now realised for the first time was an orphanage, she was told by the gardener that it had been turned into an old people's home. Old people are orphans by definition. Thus those who were spared the experience at the beginning will come to it at the end. She avoids this reflection. She remains a wise and resilient adult in her middle years. The rest may be too difficult to contemplate. Anita Brookner, review of Orphans: Real and Imaginary by Eileen Simpson,  Observer , April 1988

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize pleases me greatly, and it would have pleased Anita Brookner, who championed Ishiguro’s work, especially his earlier novels. She particularly liked his much maligned fourth novel The Unconsoled (see her Spectator review here ), a work I’ve never quite plucked up the courage to reread. It infected my dreams. I saw Ishiguro in Edinburgh in August 2000. He was a short, slightly plump figure with long mobile fingers and a clipped, patrician voice. He was speaking about his fifth novel, When We Were Orphans , which, like The Remains of the Day , is set around the second world war. He worried, he said, that the war might be a ‘technical convenience’ these days, but felt that the great questions of our age might be tackled better by not setting a novel in the modern affluent free world. Servitude had been the theme of The Remains of the Day . The English and the Japanese soul were, he said, similar, in their reverence for order, though he was ‘never awar...

Anita Brookner's hack work output was prodigious. Here's a selection from three decades of her  Spectator reviews and articles. 'A Stooge of the Spycatcher', July 1987 The painful astonishment of a deceived soul: that line from Adolphe , via Brookner's Providence , might well be applicable here. Her dismay at being mentioned in Peter Wright's notorious  Spycatcher is palpable even at this distance. But the dignity with which she sets out her 'great and steady anger' in this Spectator reply awards Brookner the undoubted moral victory. 'Repose is taboo'd by anxiety', October 1993 This piece on Oliver Sacks's Migraine is magisterial. An essay both restrained and candid. 'Even less fiction than Stranger ', May 1994 Brookner, Kafka, Camus, Existentialism: who could ask for more? The 'grandeur de l'homme sans espoir': not for the first time, one senses Brookner writing about herself while ostensibly giving he...